July 02, 2013

Relationships are very important to us!

Companies don't often talk about their ethics, but I think they should. I have a philosophy that I believe deeply (and I install in our wonderful staff) which is that no piece of business is worth losing our reputation as a honest and ethical family business. This belief is so deep that JH Bertrand will often overreact to any situation that may become an ethics issue.

The most common one we see is when a distributor is selling a piece of business to a customer (we'll call him X), and customer X calls us directly by accident or intentionally for a quote. If we see the connection which might be by recognizing the specification or seeing a clue in an email, we will immediately call the distributor and ask what they want done. We do this because we want to do whatever makes the distributor happy which might be no quote or bidding the job closer to what the distributor would be selling it for and etc. Believe me when I say we do this fast because we do. I would rather give up the job rather than have somebody say that JH Bertrand went around them.

To be bluntly honest, we catch 99% of these conflicts because of good inter-office communication. However, there are times when it does get past us. When that happens, we work things out with the distributor in a way that makes him/her whole which might mean putting a stop to the direct communication and/or sharing the margin. The above situatuion is extremely rare. I only remember that happening twice in the last 20 years. Both cases worked out fine. However, I wanted to mention this because in the age of so much interconnection, it can't be overstated enough that when you resell for JH Bertrand, you are fully protected by a strong ethic. Thank you for being a valued partner/customer of ours.

Comments

Relationships are very important to us!

Companies don't often talk about their ethics, but I think they should. I have a philosophy that I believe deeply (and I install in our wonderful staff) which is that no piece of business is worth losing our reputation as a honest and ethical family business. This belief is so deep that JH Bertrand will often overreact to any situation that may become an ethics issue.

The most common one we see is when a distributor is selling a piece of business to a customer (we'll call him X), and customer X calls us directly by accident or intentionally for a quote. If we see the connection which might be by recognizing the specification or seeing a clue in an email, we will immediately call the distributor and ask what they want done. We do this because we want to do whatever makes the distributor happy which might be no quote or bidding the job closer to what the distributor would be selling it for and etc. Believe me when I say we do this fast because we do. I would rather give up the job rather than have somebody say that JH Bertrand went around them.

To be bluntly honest, we catch 99% of these conflicts because of good inter-office communication. However, there are times when it does get past us. When that happens, we work things out with the distributor in a way that makes him/her whole which might mean putting a stop to the direct communication and/or sharing the margin. The above situatuion is extremely rare. I only remember that happening twice in the last 20 years. Both cases worked out fine. However, I wanted to mention this because in the age of so much interconnection, it can't be overstated enough that when you resell for JH Bertrand, you are fully protected by a strong ethic. Thank you for being a valued partner/customer of ours.